Innovating beyond the cleaning wipe
Our client, a purveyor of commercial cleaning and sanitizing wipes for the food service sector, came to us with aspirations of becoming trusted leaders in food safety and aim to introduce a wider range of product and service innovations beyond the wipe.
Our job was to help them develop meaningful product solutions based on unmet needs of both restaurant employees and managers that they could feasibly launch over the course of the next one to five years.
I acted as the strategy lead for this project, designing and running our user research, developing our insights and opportunities, and collaborating closely with the lead industrial designer in conceptualizing solutions. I worked closely with client stakeholders to create a product roadmap that accounted for their capabilities in manufacturing, operations, and R&D.
Client | Commercial Cleaning Products
Deliverables
The output of our research and synthesis included:
6 product concepts in the form of sketches and mood boards, highlighting reasons to believe, key features and benefits
Product roadmap for each concept, including R&D and development timing
Initial revenue model concepts
Team
Creative director
Strategy lead (me)
Industrial design lead
Program manger
Getting our hands dirty
We started our project with a foundation phase where we conducted internal stakeholder interviews, secondary research on food safety practices and protocols and an audit of competitive and analogous products. We shadowed sales team members as they visited potential customers to understand what they valued in a cleaning product. We also visited a range of food service establishments ourselves, interviewing both “users” (the staff who were using the product) and choosers (management or operations leads that made the product purchasing decisions).
These inputs helped us understand opportunity areas to develop new product concepts that we would take into further testing in a second round of on-site research sessions. We developed 27 different physical prototypes to help facilitate a discussion around which would be most useful. We let restaurant owners and facilities managers test out these prototypes in real life to give us honest feedback.
Demonstrating a new wipe concept to a restaurant owner.
Tapping into internal expertise
Before moving into our concepting and prototyping phase, we hosted a cross-disciplinary brainstorm at our studio. We invited a dozen members of our client’s organization to contribute ideas based on the opportunities we identified. Participants had backgrounds ranging from sales and marketing, to chemical and substrate R&D to engineering.
We presented ideation territories using “How Might We” statements, providing category and category inspiration to fuel the imagination. We left our workshop with over 320 distinct product ideas which we distilled into distinct product “ingredients” which became the ideas we brought into research.
Presenting out the ideas my brainstorm group had.
Providing solutions for every facet of food safey
We realized over the course of the project that in order to be known as leaders in food safety, our client had to touch on every aspect of the food prep process, from cooking and prep, to cleaning, to maintaining clean workplaces.
The solutions we developed fell into four product streams based on different areas of need:
Front of house tools for quick and discreet cleaning during service
Task tracking to help employees stay on top of various cleaning duties
Labeling and organization for reducing the risk of food borne illnesses developing in the kitchen
Resources to provide an easy to use resource for all things related to food safety.
Several of the concepts have moved into the development phase as of 2022.